A Love Letter to Masks and Shadows, A Guest post from Stephanie Burgis
Karina: I was reading my ARC of Masks and Shadows and absolutely loving each moment. It reminded me of my teenage self greedily reading Consuelo by George Sand which is similarly immersed into the world of music and secret societies of the 18th century, so I begged Stephanie to write a guest post describing what made her start writing Masks and Shadows. Thank you so much for coming over here, Stephanie, and welcome!
I was working on my very, very serious
PhD thesis (about opera and politics in late-eighteenth-century
Vienna and Eszterháza) when I stumbled unexpectedly across the spark
for my first adult novel:
“Why did the Freemasons Visit
Hell?”
It was the chapter title in a scholarly
book about Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, and yes, it was a
deliberately provocative title…but it was also written about real
rites performed by secret societies in Mozart’s Vienna, where they
– symbolically – did indeed visit Hell.
And of course, as I read about those
rites – because I was an f/sf fan long before I was a graduate
student! - I immediately wondered: What if it wasn’t just
symbolic?
Vienna was chock-full of secret
societies in the 1770s and 1780s. Mozart was a member of the
Freemasons, but there were a number of other underground societies as
well, serving everyone from bored (and, at times, extremely
dangerous) aristocrats to upwardly mobile middle-class
status-seekers.
It was also a hub of alchemy – and
not just the kind we look back on as proto-science. Nowadays, we can
feel pretty confident, as we look back on the salons and held in
upper-class Viennese drawing rooms, that the alchemists who summoned
elementals and more for eager audiences were in fact con-men. But
again, as I read about those alchemical performances, I thought: What
if…?
Joseph Haydn
Meanwhile, I was also studying the
opera house at the isolated Hungarian palace of Eszterháza, where
Joseph Haydn was the Kapellmeister, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy ruled
with absolute authority…and the Prince’s own wife was forced to
live in the shadows of their palace while Prince Nikolaus’s
much-younger mistress served as his official hostess and companion.
It was a situation ripe with emotional drama.
And when I began to read about the
fiery legal and religious debates held in different European
countries all across the century, as people fought over the question
of whether the superstar castrato singers (who, of course,
could not sire children) ought to be allowed to marry…debates which
showcased many of the same arguments that were hauled out yet again
in the debate over gay marriage in the 21st century…
Well. It all came together like the
different musical themes of a wildly romantic opera! (My very
favorite kind.)
I never did end up finishing that PhD
thesis. But I hope you guys enjoy the novel that emerged instead! :)
Summary
The year is 1779, and
Carlo Morelli, the most renowned castrato singer in Europe, has been
invited as an honored guest to Eszterháza Palace. With Carlo in Prince
Nikolaus Esterházy's carriage, ride a Prussian spy and one of the most
notorious alchemists in the Habsburg Empire. Already at Eszterháza is
Charlotte von Steinbeck, the very proper sister of Prince Nikolaus's
mistress. Charlotte has retreated to the countryside to mourn her
husband's death. Now, she must overcome the ingrained rules of her
society in order to uncover the dangerous secrets lurking within the
palace's golden walls. Music, magic, and blackmail mingle in a plot to
assassinate the Habsburg Emperor and Empress--a plot that can only be
stopped if Carlo and Charlotte can see through the masks worn by
everyone they meet.
Karina:
Guys, I loved this book and will be posting my review very soon, so totally recommend it!
